Having Sex For Fun.

Sunil was the first guy I fucked in Bangalore. It happened two days after I had moved there and one day before it occured to me that I needed to own a broom and a mop. My choice of city had been predicated on two factors —where it rained most when I first visited colleges and what place was furthest away from where I was raised — and Bangalore won on both counts. There was a violent storm the night I first visited and the shift from North to South was stark enough that my past had to take a flight to creep up on me. I met Sunil because I didn't know what to do with free time. When I was growing up that was not a concept. I am not exaggerating when I say that I genuinely believed that doing things for fun wasn't actually allowed. I wonder sometimes if the reason I learnt to have fun in ways that are completely internal and thought and self-dependent is because I did not know there were any other options. I was raised to do things that have a point and to remember that no matter what you are doing, you are always competing for something, it doesn't even matter if you know what that is, you have to be first.

I am somewhat ashamed of my competitive side because it robbed a lot experience from me when I was less than adult, I didn't allow myself to enjoy the brilliance of others without aspiring to it. It was only when I had proven to myself that I could be self-reliant, did I respect myself enough to be able to see the vibrant, enormous lives of other people without coveting their knowledge and just enjoying what they bring to the world, which has as much or as little value, as what I bring to it. It takes security to be able to be yourself enough to not want to convert into the next shiny thing you see and it takes a little while to get to security. I was taught I had to excel at everything and I was given no choice in the matter. The most violent of my mother's abuse came because of a less than perfect score at anything. She has a very "second best is just the last to lose" attitude. I lived in abject terror of a 99% score because only 100%, if even that, meant not getting beaten. I still shudder to do poorly on a test, and I take them frequently because against all evidence I love exams, there's an almost-sexual rush to taking a test, and the prospect of doing poorly is exactly the pressure I need to pull answers I didn't know I had retained out of my ass (and also because, you know, I didn't fix my mommy issues, I just started having sex with them). I did not exactly ever learn to have fun, I did not know it was allowed outside of sex. The only thing I did for recreation through my schooling was sex, first in elaborate constructs with myself, and then in elaborate constructs with other people.

Quite possibly the need for my sexual dalliances to come with emotional turmoil and tragedy was developed through the mechanism of things needing to have meaning and purpose beyond the tawdry to be allowed, and also because my vagina just wanted the weird stuff. In any case, fun had to be tragic. All my early sexual relationships were dramatic, tragic, illegal, wrong, disgusting, incestous, just straight up rape, fraught, ambiguous, too intense. Maybe even because emotional structures of eroticism extend the pleasure of the physical experience of the sex to the point where they could almost replace it. However, the primary reason why I didn't learn to have fun is because I did not know free-time was when I was growing up. I was not as over-scheduled when I worked three jobs as when I was in school. For the love of god, if your kid sucks at tennis just let them stop playing it. So as soon as I left for college and emancipated myself completely, emotionally and financially, from my parents, I was suddenly incharge of everything in my life and eager to see who I was without constructs of control and abuse. Even with study and work, I had enough time to just do *whatever I wanted*. I had no fucking idea what that meant.

I have always been a very function-oriented creature and it took many years of dedicated love and patience from my friends to get me to see the value in, and develop the ability to sit down and just talk to them without wandering around looking for other things to do. I did not understand fun as a function, I seem like a fun person but I am really just a formulaic person, when you do fun things with me, like play a game or get drunk or plan a trip, you learn how terribly un-fun I am. I could not decide when I was eighteen what to do with this newfound concept of what was fun so I thought: *Let's just..have sex, I guess?* I was horny, I had the time and I knew this was a thing I liked to do. So I went to the bar closest to my new home, it was a bar that played hard rock and serviced the most smug of the Bangalore music elite (which, that is just the whole personality of the city right? Beer and rock and reminiscing about how it used to be?). Banglore music elites present with *chappals*, long hair and the tragic air of lung cancer waiting to happen. This was very well aligned with the sensibilities of my eighteen year-old self. Pierce something weird on your face, be older than you should be to fuck me, wear black and talk incessantly about how you understand what that one song was *really* about. I was attracted to all of them, so I just picked the one closest to where I was sitting, banging his head to the gut-wrenching sounds of instruments begging not to be played with the delicacy of an ox.

His name was Sunil and to the surprise of absolutely no one he used to work in tech and was then working on launching his own start-up (and yes, he totally had one of *those* bags). I asked Sunil what he does and then I asked Sunil if he wanted to have sex. That is really exactly how it went. I have the delicacy of an ox, actually. This is how I approached all the people I wanted to have sex with back then, I just asked them: *I was wondering if you would you like to fuck?* Fewer or more words depending on how loud the music was wherever we were. I would just ask, they mostly said yes and then I went with them to their places. In the present, when I look back, I wonder how the fuck I am alive. The manner in which I treated my safety was so casual. I went across town, at times, with men who didn't speak a word of any language I did and it did not occur to me that something bad could happen. I think that's what happened when you over-solve a problem? I was violated in a place where I was supposed to be safe, so I over-corrected by insisting of believing I was safer in seemingly unwise situations just because I chose them for myself.

But Sunil was chill (and by that I mean he was Mallu).

He fucked me, and then he asked me if I wanted to meet up with some of his friends and get high. I had done some ill-adviced dangerous drugs for a short spell earlier and smoked some recreational hash in my life. Sunil and his friends was my first time really smoking weed and as I did it, I realised, I really liked that feeling. It was calming and definitely reduced my need to move around all the time. It made having fun seem like a not-so-ridiculous idea, but this story is not about my love affair with marijuana. It's about Sunil. I didn't really want to fuck Sunil again. It's not because the sex was bad, it was just that I had extracted all the fun from that lemon, but I was in a new town and I didn't know where they sold weed there so I had to ask Sunil the next day. I asked him, he told me he would bring me some, and then I started to wonder if it was implied that I would sleep with him again. I had never had a no-fuss hook-up before. I fucked only within emotionally fraught situations, at the very least one of us had to be cheating on someone. I did not know what you were supposed to do and I was used to men who exploit me, love me too much, mistreat me, groom me. I wasn't sure what the rules were for men in bars you met as an adult. I just didn't want to have sex with him again.

I just told him that. I met him to get my weed and he asked if I wanted to go to his place, and I told him, that I didn't really want to have sex anymore and then I apologised. That is a result of shit you are taught as a woman, I used to feel like I had to apologise for wanting choice.

"It's chill bro," he said, laughing and patting my shoulder, "We don't have to have sex if you don't want to, enjoy your weed and if you even wanna get high together, let me know. You're a chill bro."

I had never in my life anticipated hearing that sentence. In my experience men hounded you, gaslit you, raped you, trapped you, forced you to love them and never ever let you leave unless you agreed to take the damage that evidences their existence in your eternal soul. And this guy, was like, it's chill bro. In my experience sex had never seemed so emotionally and socially accessible, in the sense that the drama, partly by design and partly by the socio-cultural environment where I was raised, had always come with it somehow. When I had sex with Sunil, I realised I could enjoy sex just for just the bodily aspects of how people rubbed against one another. It was nice. It was fun. I was astounded it could be like that, I was astounded be could be so casual.

*It's chill bro.*

And then it was. I finally knew what I wanted to do with my free time. I wanted to fuck like a chill bro. Enjoy it, be honest about what I wanted from it, engage with only my physical self, do it with whoever seemed appealing for any reason whatsoever (so long as they wanted it too) and do it casually like going out to watch a movie with your friends. I had to find something to do with my free time, seriously, and I was never going to be caught dead at the cinema. Sunil showed me I could have sex like a chill bro and he gave my life excellent direction. I finally learnt how to be chill about something, to do something just for the pleasure-based process of doing it. Not because it broke my heart or healed it, just because it was fun to get naked and see what our bodies did. Recreational sex was so much fun. I never thought of it, really, as being a slut, that word doesn't thrill, demean or empower me. I thought of it as being a chill sex bro.

Now I am back to more carefully curated elaborate constructs for the most part, but casual, recreational sex is still what occurs to me when someone asks me what I do for fun because I think that's it. My list is a phrase.